You’ve got your amazing idea down for a story but how do you begin? You want to make your first chapter amazing! En medias res means opening in the midst of the plot. This way, exposition is bypassed, allowing you to fill it in more gradually, either through dialogue ...

Masked, Unknown Characters

Fiction, certainly in the movie/TV/comics visual mediums, are full of characters whose identities are hidden by masks.

On The Mandalorian, the title character follows a strict creed that says he is not supposed to let another living being see his face, so he always wears ...

The lands were riven by catastrophic war, but the forces of evil were eventually crushed with the help of the great guardian dragon, Lord Dogoran… though he was grievously poisoned. He survived but his time grows short now and his health fails daily, soon there will be no one left ...

Spoilers for recent Star Wars, eg the Mandalorian.
It went unspoken in my year of Newsposts, but 2020 is the 40th Anniversary the release of The Empire Strikes Back.

that's not true! That's impossible!
No, man! Search your feelings! you know it's true! Forty damn years!


Though ...

A terrible disaster has befallen all of the earth! A lowly algebra teacher, Dork Scahawgian, and his evil sentient computer, Vidi82, have somehow managed to scorch the entire planet and a good portion of the population including himself. Thankfully many were transported away to safety and in the process they ...

When a character the story's cast and audience identify and are familiar with dies, the effect is, or should be, monumental.

Not only because that effectively ends that character's journey (and arc), but also because as an event it has immediate ramifications for all the surviving characters.

First ...

Lord Ziot is about to have a bad day… actually, and extremely bad day! He's come down to earth looking for a very powerful helmet that increases the wearer's intelligence and abilities as well as allowing them control of all sorts of alien hi-tech stuff, but before he ...

I couldn't have been older than 11 when I read The Flaming Heart of Danko by Maxim Gorky. And boy, did it cut me with the finest of fine glass. Even now thinking about the short story hurts somewhere deep in my soul.

And yet, I love it so ...

what's in the box?

Ah, December!

We're in the final month of the year, and Christmas is in sight. If you celebrated Christmas, or any other gift-oriented holiday, you probably remember the anticipation before the big day, and the excitement over what would be waiting for you.

It ...

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Coming up with character names isn't easy. It can actually be really, really hard! Tantz did a couple helpful Newsposts about it and we decided to ...